We
went to see The Fall Guy, and it’s
terrific. Not what you’d call deep, by any means, but enormously
entertaining. Some
thoughts about that.
John
Wayne made The Big Trail, directed by
Raoul Walsh, in 1930. It did not, however, to Walsh’s surprise,
make Wayne a
star. Watching it, you can see why. The Big
Trail is a good picture, shot in any early version of ‘scope, and by most
any yardstick, pretty spectacular. Wayne, on the other hand,
is pretty callow. He hasn’t really grown
into his own shoes. This doesn’t happen
until 1939, and the release of Stagecoach. In between, over about ten years, Wayne cranked out some
sixty movies for Republic Pictures, most of them hour-long B-westerns, made for
the bottom half of a double bill at a kids’ matinee.
They
were shot very fast and loose – in a typical year, 1934, Wayne appeared in nine
of them, and Randy Rides Alone is
probably the only one still worth watching – and they followed a formula: the
trick was in the stunts. The scripts
were lame, the characters were cardboard, but Wayne and Yakima Canutt staged
their fight scenes together, and Yakima
doubled for Wayne
in the more dangerous gags. (You can see
Wayne riding a shovel down a plume of water in a
spillway, in Randy, but it’s Yakima who jumps off a
running horse, onto a bridge railing, and into a river. There’s also a great jump, off a moving train into a river, in The Trail Beyond.) There were, on average, three of these stunts
per picture, and at least one knock-down, drag-out brawl – one of the best is Wayne
and Ward Bond (doing an uncharacteristic turn as a crooked lawyer, defrauding a
widder woman), in Tall in the Saddle. You weren’t going to these pictures for uplift, you went to hold your breath.
Yakima
Canutt famously doubled Wayne
in Stagecoach, too. He jumps from the box down between the team
of runaway horses pulling the stage, and dances along the doubletrees to mount
the lead horse and gather up the reins. Wayne later remarked,
Canutt did the stunt, I got the close-up.
Canutt’s the Apache that gets shot off
the horses, too, does the fall under their hooves, and then lies flat between
the stagecoach wheels, going by on either side.
I think it’s the first time that was ever done. And he’s most
famously second unit on Ben-Hur,
stunt coordinator for the chariot race. He won them those eleven Oscars.
All
this in aid of why The Fall Guy is so
good. Stunt guys have gotten screen time
before; Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham collaborated on half a dozen pictures - Needham reportedly
punctured a lung and broke his back along the way, invented the cannon roll and
the airbag, and essentially established the category of stunt designer. David Leitch, who directed The Fall Guy (his previous credits
include Bullet Train and Atomic Blonde) started his career in
stunts: Fight Club, Buffy, Ghosts of Mars, Troy, Ocean’s Eleven, he’s doubled Brad Pitt a
lot. The
Fall Guy is very much an homage,
then.
It’s
not so much an homage to the Lee Majors television series, though, which ran
from 1981 to 1986, as it is inspired
by it. And one of the cooler conceits of
the movie is a sort of meta
narrative. Not just the inside baseball,
and Easter eggs, which abound, and which are used to terrific comic effect, but
a sense that you’re drawing on the physicality of movies themselves, the real
in service of the pretend: it hurts
to fall off a building. (Or the
alternative, to see Buster Keaton miss
being hit by a collapsing building; the earth moves, he remains still.) I briefly had some fanboy letters back and
forth with Peter Breck before he died, and he
said Lee Majors was a real gent. This
was when I asked Peter about his guest shots on Fall Guy, the series. He
pointed out that he wasn’t the only one, that there was Doug McClure, and Jock
Mahoney, and Clu Gulager, and a host of others.
Not that there weren’t a lot of terrific character actors guesting on
the show, but these guys in particular had all been regulars on older TV series,
the era of The Big Valley and before.
This
is what I’m driving at with The Fall Guy,
the movie. It has a respectful sense of
itself. Yes, it’s a series of set
pieces. Yes, the plot’s nothing to write
home about. Yes, the leads are hugely
charming, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt bring their A-game, without being
self-consciously cute. (Although they
are indeed cute.) And the way that the
stunt gags are deployed are, yes, breathtaking - but something else.
You’re both in on the game, yet ready to be astonished, at the audacity
of it all, the suspension of disbelief.
It’s magic. It’s sleight of hand, or eye. We know
it’s a trick, and that simply adds to our delight. We go to the show to be fooled.
